marzo 2013 Blog Posts

Dealing with uncertainty, unknowns, risks and change

More traditional approaches to projects management, products development and software development life cycle management focus on what is known & knowable Everyone have different innate abilities and preferences among reflection and planning Vs reaction and adaptation and different levels of tolerance to uncertainties, risk and change while what matter is a balance and a tolerance that is good for the specific project/product and context. What practices and skills are useful to deal with unknowns, how much risk and uncertainty is convenient for each specific product/project, what is a good balance between planning and reaction/adaptation in each specific context ? read about Contextual fitness...

posted @ martedì 19 marzo 2013 16:30 | Feedback (0)

Dealing with uncertainty, unknowns, risks and change: Contextual fitness for purpose

Contextual fitness for purpose Traditional tools (intended as skills, practices, organization of work) used to deal with software products and projects originate from the industrial-age where communication was very limited. The new tools Lean & Agile add to the toolbox originates from the information-age where a large communication bandwidth and a short response-time create the dynamic environment we are living in, where unpredictability, uncertainty, interdependency reach a new level. The good set of practices and a proper organization of the work for each product/project is determined by the characteristic of each specific product/project. This is why it's important...

posted @ martedì 19 marzo 2013 15:39 | Feedback (0)

Dealing with uncertainty, unknowns, risks and change: Practices

Practices During the last year I had the chance to highlight that Lean & Agile Software Development provide new tools to add to the toolbox that are useful to deal with uncertainty, unknowns, opportunities, risks change and unexpected events that are outside our control or influence Previous posts detailed the sources of the former [1] and the sources of the latter [2]. Lean & Agile Software Development deal with the former with Just-In-Time, Iterative, Adaptive, Good Enough planning [3] [4] and deal with the latter with practices that help to achieve Agility [5], both are traits...

posted @ martedì 19 marzo 2013 15:35 | Feedback (1)

Dealing with uncertainty, unknowns, risks and change: Structure & Organization

Structure & Organization From the work organization point of view there are 2 approaches with many differences between them: the Hierarchical organization of work (like i.e. the old military organizations) and the Edged organization of work (like i.e. the one of spontaneous online communities). It is common to have a mix of the 2, a Hierarchical organization optimized for the collaboration. That usually is more flat then deep and more cross-functional then specialized in silos. The idea again is to find a good mix that have the contextual fitness for purpose for the specific product/project and context. Let's compare the Hierarchical organization of...